Hacker News Reader

Comment by sreya | Hacker News Reader

Not being able to play Youtube in the background on your phone is unfortunately one of the main appeals of Premium. There's a lot of good mixes, concerts, etc that I play for the audio while doing something else that I can't do without Premium unless I wanted to leave my phone unlocked (and pray I don't pocket click a link).

View on HN

My iPhone running Safari and uBlock Origin lite is able to do this. I don't have the youtube app installed. I don't even think the ad blocker is necessary for background audio, but I don't want to see ads.

1. Go to youtube.com in the browser, play the video, switch back to the home screen. Video playback will stop, which is a good default behavior.

2. Swipe down from the top of the screen which brings up "Notification Center" which somewhat strangely contains a playback control for the browser.

3. Press play. Audio resumes. If it's part of a playlist, you don't have to manually advance, it will play automatically.

No ads, no youtube premium subscription, no "desktop mode", no sideloading, no additional apps other than the beloved ad blocker.

TIL Thank you pal, it perfectly works!

Firefox Android can play audio even when the phone is locked, and I use it regularly.

Note: If you have a mid-range to lower end phone, battery optimization might stop your playback anyway by default. You can exclude Firefox from battery optimization though.

brave on android can also do the same, not sure about ios

I'm fairly certain if you use a browser and the desktop version of the site you can listen with the screen off/locked.

If you're on Android, YouTube Revanced does this (+many other premium features)

I run Brave (Android) on my phone and don't have any ads on Youtube. I think it worked on Brave iOS but I sold my iPhone last year.

I let Brave run in the background and it seems to work fine.

Brave is a series scam company.

I don't think that is true and I don't really care. The browser works properly, it has ad-blocking built in and it is trivial to turn off the other nonsense in the browser.

You can open youtube in the phone's web browser and install an extension that blocks a site's ability to tell when focus has left the page/app. This is how I listen to some music on my phone while working out.

Ad blockers help with the constant nagging about "open in the app!"

NewPipe

Never works

Reply on news.ycombinator.com